In the 1990s groups of utilities along with their federal and state regulators began forming independent system operators (ISOs) or regional transmission organizations (RTOs) as states and regions in the United States established wholesale competition for electricity. ISOs and RTOs (hereafter ISOs) coordinate generation and transmission of electric power across wide geographic regions, matching generation to load instantaneously to keep supply and demand for electricity in balance. These organizations forecast load and schedule generation to assure sufficient capacity and back-up power in case demand rises, a power-plant goes offline or a power line is lost. The primary role of the ISO is to ensure equal access to the power grid for non-utility firms, enhance the reliability of the transmission system and operate wholesale electricity markets which includes the flow of money between wholesale producers, marketers, transmission and distribution service providers (TDSP) owners, buyers including other ISOs.
TDSP entities are responsible for the transmission and distribution of energy through power lines that they are responsible to maintain and typically own. As service providers, they typically own the metering devices attached to residential and commercial customers, servicing the meters and reading them periodically.
A Public Utilities Commission (PUC) regulates the delivery of electricity including reliability and safety, rates and terms, setting the operating standards for the TDSPs. The PUC typically oversees the regional ISO market, for example by reviewing proposals for new transmission facilities or generators. The PUC enforces rules and regulations for retail competition, including customer protections, “price to beat” rules and the implementation of renewable energy goals. The PUC also handles the licensing and rules enforcement to REPs.
An example of an ISO is the Energy Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) which manages the Texas power grid, an example of a TDSP is TXU Energy Delivery; an example of a PUC is the Texas Public Utilities Commission.
The operation of a wholesale electricity market by the ISO enables local retail electricity providers (REPs) to buy and sell electricity on a real-time spot market basis supplying REPs with a means for meeting consumer needs for power at the lowest possible costs. An example of a REP is Ambit Energy, Inc. of Dallas, Tex. REPs have need for an accurate and continuous information exchange with ISOs including data such as market transactions and information related thereto, historical or current load information and customer specific transactions (e.g. connect or disconnect, meter readings, etc.). The state of the art in the energy industry to exchange information with ISOs is to utilize the electronic data interchange (EDI) standard.
REPs have certain requirements typically set by the relevant state public utilities commission to have adequate technical resources to provide continuous and reliable electric service to customers in its service area and for the technical and managerial ability to supply electric services at retail in accordance with its customer contracts. Such resources include a fundamental capability to comply with all scheduling, operating, planning, reliability, customer registration policies, settlement policies, and other rules and procedures as established by the ISO. The REP must have the ability to meet ISO requirements for 24 hour coordination with control centers for scheduling changes, reserve implementation, curtailment orders, interruption plan implementation and escalation procedures. The REP must meet certain financial standards relating to the protection of its customers and sufficient for accurate billing and collection from its customers.
An example of a set of requirements for REPs is the Texas state PUC document: P.U.C. SUBST. R.25, “Substantive Rules Applicable to Electric Service Providers”, Chapter 25.
In general there is a significant amount of information that must be managed and serviced on a real-time basis (often minute to minute) by a REP to meet the requirements and to operate its systems effectively. For example, the costs of energy are generally fluctuating according to market prices and thereby rated in time intervals of 15 minutes and sold in blocks of time. The REP continuously purchases blocks of energy on the market to meet its demands, sometimes only 15 minutes in advance, but normally several days in advance or according to a forecasted buy order. To determine the costs of energy usage for its customer base a REP must be able to accurately correlate customer usage information with the rated cost of the energy as it was purchased in a given block for a given geographical area.
A need exists in the retail electric provider business community for a comprehensive automated system to manage market transactions with the ISO, apply business rules and requirements, apply ratings to usage, perform customer analysis and quality control audits, perform customer billing including customer protective measures in collection, process customer payments, manage 3rd party sales and marketing subsystems, manage customer acquisition and residual income systems and manage customer service systems including call centers and back-office support for financial and corporate executives.
FIG. 1 shows a representative situation of the prior art. A process for servicing energy customers 10 is indicated on a timeline 90. End customer 20 has their local meters read or serviced by the TDSP 30 which in turn submits the service information to ISO 40. ISOs sort the various service data coming in from a variety of TDSPs in a variety of geographical locations and sends the service information to the appropriate REP. In FIG. 1, ISO 40 sends service information from end customer 20 to REP 50 for processing. The service information arrives at REP 50 mainframe computer 60 in the form of an electronic data interexchange (EDI) formatted transaction. A set of transactions are the processed by a set of service operators 70. In addition to processing transactions, set of service operators 70 may also perform a set of manual system operations 80 including, for example, usage rating, customer billing, bill collections activities, connect and disconnect orders, and some sales functions. Those of skill in the art will recognize that in the prior art REP 50 will require a large number of service operators 70 to keep the time from end customer requests to the processing of those requests to a minimum. In the prior art, the time lag of delivery of a meter read may be on the order of days or a week.
The system of the present invention was designed to address the following issues competitive REPs face (and others):
1. Market Exceptions
2. Cost of doing business
3. Cash flow exposure
4. Rapid responses to Market/Customer preference changes.
The primary issue that residential energy utilities face with their back-office systems is the large amount of market data exceptions that typically occur between the REP and the TDSP. Market exceptions include data integrity issues to operating issues that result in complex customer situations, such as errors in meter reads and service change requests. Together with a large customer base, these exceptions create a ripple effect across the back-office that typically results in errors with:
Billing
Service provisioning timing
Collections and Treatment processes
The present invention addresses the pervasive problems created by market exceptions though a novel system design that segments system responsibility, promotes system “learning” without introducing complexity, and supports large customer data sets. For example, system exceptions are categorized and managed through an exception flow. End users use interface heuristics to further define and resolve all exceptions, including through the addition of new system rules.
A further novel aspect of the present invention addresses the overall cost of doing business of a REP. The energy industry is a commodity driven market. Competitive advantages rely on service quality and accuracy in billing. The present invention creates a competitive position for the reseller by fundamentally reducing the cost to operate. This is achieved by:                1. Flow through transaction business rule processing that reduces exceptions typically handled by staff,        2. Automated Rating, quality control, and billing systems that reduces the need of staff,        3. System intelligence and analysis in “Treatment”—i.e., the handling of customers with past due balances in the best manner possible. Staff costs are reduced in operating treatment through systems. Additional staff costs are avoided by ensuring treatment works correctly, thus avoiding escalating customer issues which in turn consumes more staff resources to resolve.        
A further novel aspect of the present invention addresses a common issue faced by a REP, namely, cash/capital requirements to support billing in arrears. Meter reads are performed by the TDSP and the read sent to the REP to bill in arrears. This results in the reseller having to “front” its customer's energy base as it attempts to collect from customers after purchasing the energy. The present invention addresses this though automated, real-time flow-through of meter read transactions that result in near-same day billing. This optimizes the cash collection process in order to reduce cash exposure.
A further novel aspect of the present invention addresses resistance in back-office IT systems of the REP, that prevent companies from implementing changes and improvements in system functions to meet customer/market demands. The modular design and solid relational data architecture prescribed in the preferred embodiment of the present invention, coupled with defined development standards, provide the REP with the ability to quickly and cost-effectively introduce system changes.
Yet another novel aspect of the present invention is the combination of features meant to automatically ensure the integrity of energy business data to meet PUC requirements, said combination comprising a market transaction manager, business rules and requirements processor, usage rater, customer analysis and quality control auditor, customer billing processor and collection manager, customer payment processor, third party sales and marketing subsystems API, customer acquisition and residual income web interface and customer service and executive backoffice systems, all said subsystems interacting with an intelligent SQL database subsystem. In a preferred embodiment of the present invention, said features are implemented as a coordinated set of software programs running under the framework of a Microsoft Windows™ Services platform utilizing Microsoft C#.net as the programming environment.